Mr. Block, Vol. XX

Listen all y’all, it’s a sabotage.

Comics and politics were intermingling long before Alan Moore and David Lloyd ever slapped a Guy Fawkes mask on their freedom fighting hero in V for Vendetta. Back in 1912, a German immigrant named Ernest Riebe started drawing his Mr. Block comics for the Spokane Industrial Worker, a newspaper associated with the militant Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies. “Mr. Block is legion,” Walker C. Smith writes in the introduction to a 1984 collection of Riebe’s comics. “He is representative of the host of slaves who think in terms of their masters. Mr. Block owns nothing, yet he speaks from the standpoint of the millionaire; he is patriotic without patrimony; he is a law-abiding outlaw; he boasts of ‘our tremendous wheat exports,’ yet has no bread on his table; he licks the hand that smites him and kisses the boot that kicks him; he is the personification of all that a worker should not be.”

Blunderbuss is excited to run these public domain comics, provided courtesy of IWW.org. In the 20th of the 24 existent Mr. Block comics, our hero encounters the capitalist’s idea of fair workman’s comp.
For the other comics in this series, click here.

Ernest Riebe immigrated to the United States from his native Germany sometime around the turn of the 20th century. Not much of his biography is known. His “Mr. Block” comics began appearing in the Spokane Industrial Worker in 1912, and his art appeared in IWW publications through 1922. His eventual fate is also unknown, but his most famous creation was immortalized in a song by Joe Hill titled, appropriately, “Mr. Block.”

Latest

Like us on Facebook

Latest Tweets

ABOUT

We are Blunderbuss Magazine, a web magazine of arts, culture, and politics, an ordnance of fire and improvisation. What ties together these essays, stories, poems, photographs, comics, and other bits of aesthetic shrapnel is a common attitude of visceral humanism. We aim for earnest noise. We want to splash in the mud of lived experience, to battle for a radical empathy, and to provide a megaphone to howling assertions of human subjectivity.